Just curious what everyone thinks of the Calligra suite. It was previous koffice but has been rebranded to Calligra (-current).

I've noticed very poor performance while running it and have experienced quite a bit of bugginess with it. I was a bit disappointed that after being rebranded that it still seems to be very raw.

Has anyone noticed this? What is your experience or thoughts on it?

I'm sticking with LibreOffice. I work with MS documents and was hoping Calligra would handle conversion well so I could switch to it, since it runs a little lighter than LibreOffice. Alas, no. That functionality is pretty buggy.

I've noticed some random crashes, too.

Have you tried Softmaker?

Not much.
Installed it over the weekend and ran it for a while to see if it was an improvement over KOffice and un-installed it.

To be fair, KOffice isn't great, either.

Never liked K-office much. Open / Libre Office always felt more solid. Have not tried and am not likely to try a K-Office re-brand. What's the point of yet another Office Suite when Libre has got such solid support from both hackers and corporates?

I think it is nice to have a choice. I've tried Calligra, but, I am sticking with Libreoffice.

In my opinion, Calligra/KOffice are able to handle simple tasks, but are not even close to their competitors. They are a little buggy, and I feel unconfortable when working with them.

I'd rather use Abiword and Gnumeric instead of Calligra's alternatives. My first choice is, however, LibreOffice.

Over the years I have tried many office suites. One of the best was the original StarOffice, before it became OpenOffice.org. Very snappy even on low-spec hardware, with a good database module and unmatched integration of applications. Of the two remaining incarnations, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, I clearly prefer the latter, and it's what I use most, currently. However, both suites are clumsy, compared to its original heritage.

Another office suite I used for several years is Applixware. Very fast, including a nice and simple email client, and excellent scalability. You want to create huge text documents and giant spreadsheets, but without a noticeable speed penalty? You want to have real-time spreadsheet calculations? You think, that an application should be stable and robust, and that this is more important than that it "looks good"? You want to connect a document to a real relational database, such as Adabas D? And caculations in the spreadsheet should be *fast*? Then Applixware is something I can recommend. Weak points? The presentation program leaves something to be desired, the GUI is old-fashioned, and the overall handling of the whole suite is generally a bit outdated. It is now Gtk+, and doesn't integrate well with KDE. And it is a bit tricky to get it running, as even the "free-for-personal-use" version requires a local licence server. The server comes with the suite, but it is not very intuitive to set it up (but it's well documented). Finally, to my knowledge there is no 64-bit version (but my info may be outdated, as well...).
Overall a really good office suite, and BTW one of the first to support the Euro symbol. It's not open source, but free of charge for personal use.

The best office suite for Linux today appears to be Softmaker Office. It's very fast, too, has no problems with huge documents, is actively maintained, available for Android (and other mobile platforms, AFAIK) and has the by far best support for foreign formats. It's the only office suite on the market with equally good support for ODF and Microsoft Office. It's a commercial product, but with a very fair price tag, given the extremely high quality of all components of this office suite. My favourite! Disadvantage: Looks a bit too much like MS Office (but handles big documents much more reliably!).

Abiword, Gnumeric etc. Gnumeric is great, Abiword is not much more than a Wordpad clone. Not a bad one, and sometimes it's enough. But it's not very well suited for big documents. Both suffer from a lack of support for standard document formats. While ODF support is "ok" (far from perfect) in Gnumeric, it's not seriously available in Abiword. RTF is ok for simple documents, though, and Abiword does well, what it does. However, that's not much more than what can be done with Vim.

Calligra finally is under eternal development, it seems. I made some random attempts to load documents that I had created with LibreOffice before and stored in ODF. None of the documents was displayed correctly. Also, the web site promises the suite to be fast. It's not, but that may be due to debugging code being still included. One thing I like about it, however, is the GUI. The developers had the courage, to think about usability, instead of just copying the UI of another suite. To summarize: I kinda like it, but 2.4 is the first production release, and it's buggy. There is a lot of potential in Calligra, though, to become an excellent alternative to the others mentioned above. The modern GUI and the superior integration of the applications of the suite with each other and KDE are good points for Calligra. But stability has to be further improved, applications like Krita must become way faster, the font display quality must be enhanced and, most important, the support for ODF must finally reach 100% compatibility with the standard and/or LibreOffice.

gargamel

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One major show stopper for me. it does not save in MS format. I have to send out documents to MS Office users, LibreOffice allows me to save as...

I was delighted to find something that would read my .rtf files without having to open up Libreoffice Write. Callibre launches quickly and presents the formatting well, but it won't save the rtf file as an rtf. Yes, and it does crash unexpectedly.

After being excited to try something new, I worked with it for about a week and now I'm done.

It's LibreOffice for me. I can put up with a slower launch when it comes with more stability, better presentation and more of the features I'm looking for.


I'm still looking for a decent Textedit/Wordpad clone that is snappy and light like a text editor, but can still deal with rtf text formatting and graphics and such like the Mac/Win utilities can, so I don't have to fire up a full-featured word processing program every time I want something more that what Mousepad can do.

Haven't tried it myself, but maybe Ted is what you are looking for. There's a SlackBuild script available at SBo.

gargamel

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Thanks gargamel,

That looks like it might do the trick.

but... the slackbuild (and patch) are for version 2.21

The only source I find available is for the current version 2.22

This will make the build tricker...

Libreoffice. I am forced to use Office 2007 on my work laptop (shhh...I snuck in a 10GB Slackware partion, hopefully IT wont find out....) and Libreoffice 3.5 does a far job when I need to swap files.

In many cases you can use the build script from SBo for newer versions than the one it was made for by just changing the version number to the one you want to build. You can do this with the text editor of your choice or "customize" it from within sbopkg. You'll have to modify the actual build script and the info file, probably named ted.SlackBuild and ted.info. Additionally, in ted.info you should empty the MD5SUM,

If you want to build a "perfect" package, it would, of course, be even better to enter the correct MD5 sum for the source package. You can compute it by applying the program md5sum on the command line to the tar.gz. See the man page or run $md5sum --help to get details. But if you want quick progress and don't plan to re-distribute the source file, an empty MD5SUM will do.

Sometimes, however, dependencies or the file structure of source packages change, and the SlackBuild script fails. So there's no guarantee, that the above will work for you. But if it doesn't there's still src2pkg, a program that also attempts to create a Slackware binary package from a foreign source. It analyses the source package and doesn't require a SlackBuild script, info file etc., as it tries to create them based on information found in the source package. I had good luck with it many times in the past, and only few cases, where it failed.

Good luck!

gargamel

You can download 2.21's source from VectorLinux >>> http://distro.ibiblio.org/vectorlinu.../ted/2.21/src/

PS. If you like Ted, you could then send an e-mail to the SlackBuild's maintainer to let him/her know a new version is available.

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